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I used to parse HTML data using regular expressions and XML documents using xml parsers which normally parsed documents into arrays and hashes (key-value pairs).

But this time, I needed to retrieve only specific nodes of an XML document with some specific attribute. To do this, I could retrieve all nodes and then go through all records and use some conditions to get only those I am interested in or use some clever, modern solution. And this is where libXML stepped in.

In my opinion, regular expressions are one of the most useful things in general programming and are one of my secret weapons. I use them very often for parsing data from web pages, parsing out language strings from game code (for internationalizing the game), modifying and processing text files, processing output of various utilities like the “svn” terminal client. I mostly use Ruby or Perl for these as they offer various other cool features for text processing (and Perl is super-fast as well).